The Transit Lounge: A Handbook for the Recently Deceased
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The Transit Lounge existed in the space between Gate C7 and nowhere in particular. Elena had been sitting there for three hours when she realized the clock on the wall was moving backwards in increments of eleven minutes. The woman across from her was crying into a cup of coffee that refilled itself every time she lifted it to her lips, and somewhere behind the bar, a man in a red vest was polishing the same glass he'd been polishing since 1973. The place was called Transit Lounge because of the bizarre sensory phenomena when you entered it. Elena had spent a pleasant half hour being high on her own breath, apparently in absentia. It was pleasant to become productive again.
She'd also heard that Transit Lounge was a prime hunting ground for various circles of inexperts who made a hobby of minimally euthanizing desperately lonely victims of society.
Society, Elena thought. In the Transit Lounge.
"I want to go to Key West," the woman told the counter, wiping her eyes.
"I'm afraid you don't have a ticket," the bartender said, his eyes still on the half-empty contents of a bottle of whiskey. "Maybe next time."
"Please," the woman pleaded. "I know it's wrong - cant feel good, hurting people - but you must help me!"
Elena knew she should write this down or something - that's what journalists do - but it was the first time in her life she'd ever caught herself telling the truth, so her pen wouldn't work. "We're not in power, we're in propulsion," she murmured to herself. "Detailed planning."
She looked down at her ginger ale and the clock lost its dimensional properties altogether.
"Elena? Could you listen to me for a moment?"
The voice came from one of the rows of chairs leading into a cold, blank room. Elena had never noticed the door before. The shelf of books it concealed extended to the top of the wall, from which fingermarks spoke as an alternate language. Judging by the dead flies suspended in the webbing, there was a window on the other side. A worn no-name paperback sat open on the edge of a thousand-luckworth bookcase table; Elena read, Without exaggeration, I have never felt anything like this. It was about five inches thick, so that probably meant it was ten feet long.
"Why not?" came Elena's reply.
Elena walked through the door before the other woman had finished her sneezing fit.
"You're not her," said the little man, his hand on the back of his shoulder. "Stork sent - anticipated response - admirable...bargain?" he waved his fingers to the nearest shelf. "I need your credentials, your passport-"
"No," Elena said, awash in a flood of memories.
"You're the reincarnation of Archpirate Stalf, survivor of the Dead Sea Project?"
"I'm nobody," Elena said, then lowered her voice. "That is, I'm nobody according to popular opinion."
"But," the little man said as Elena picked his book from the table, "You're dead! The Project took decades - "
"We're both dead, to begin with," Elena said, beginning to get bored. "Now that you and I have both been brutally murdered, we have the precedent for continuity established. Those brief, shining moments when we're not in our proper bodies, or outside time, we could say we were really, on the other hand. Can do whatever we damned well please, right? Get, whoever we wanted? Think, how much time there is in a passionless right now. There's an eternity passing over us any time we close our eyes, Elena Magnus, eternal twin of Archpirate Stalf, this is chaos tv, and ET can pockmark her face with her own dead mother's horn. - could have been worth if we'd continued - oh? I think we did. Enslave the world or something. I think I remember. We didn't dial the numbers right in the last, I should go back and fix it. In time. Fall down an elevator shaft. I think - I don't know - I close my eyes. Find out - I have a nanny. A cryogenic freezer, maybe. I could..." She stopped when it became obvious the little man was looking at her.
But what she said had been important - important enough to remember, probably.
"People are going to come in here and they're gonna be cold and they're goin' to be afraid, and they're gonna ask you here if they're really dead, and would you tell them no? No?"
The little man was picking up his book again. "See? They'll think you've given the best advice of all their lives. All you've got to do when they get over here is give me something I can print, something to remember, and I'll put it there. On the shelf."
The Guild that used those names was hopelessly antiquated, but it wasn't afraid.
"We've never once had to hurt anyone. Maybe that's why people trust us so far."
She broke out a notebook and started writing in a spastic cursive.
"but there's nothing to keep you from being who you are and sticking it to your superiors, Elena"
No comeback affected.
"I'm at a standstill, here," a voice murmured in the distance. It came from the opposite side of the alley. "I still can't bring myself to renounce them. I'm halfway through tying a noose. What would you do if you were here hooked up to your illusion?"
No one else could see the crook of her foot poking out of a six-week-old grave.
"Someone might come along who questions their untethered mania, Elena, prepare your notebook."
It's always Clement-aflame on a red satin screen.
"Don't worry," she said. "Sometimes - it's okay. Time doesn't seem to matter."
"You wouldn't dream of divulging our methods."
"I think it's time for a return visit," she said. "I'll go get ready." For what, she wasn't sure. But she had a sudden, overwhelming impulse to find someone to tell her she was going to hell, just to make sure.
"So. It's your finest hour of rebirth. You slip out of the mortal coil for the first time, that's your first night in a grave, pretty exciting remember. You could come in the front door or the backdoor and Elena Magnus is none the wiser. Then there's the second night. There's the sun, go back in the evening, isn't that kind of nice. She's blue by the end, no soft evening glow attributed her. You emerge with it. It's a silvery sack cloth shroud. It looks like something pretty. You pick it up, put it on. Think you'd make a pretty corpse. That's for the water, we came out of the water, everyone knows. Towel off.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title